Milie & Telly

Milie & Telly is one part TwickS, one part shump, and 100% horrible. I hesitate to call it the worst Xbox Live Indie Game I’ve yet played, because I’ve used that one a couple of times and I don’t want to sound like a person prone to hyperbole. Still, I put about 90 minutes into Milie & Telly and I’m hard-pressed to think of even the slightest complement to pay towards it.

It’s a shump. One that, for the most part, only had a couple of enemies on screen at a time. All of which are total bullet-sponges. They come in either a red or yellow variety and you have to shoot them with the correct bullet, like Ikaruga. It’s also a TwickS, so you in theory should have precision aiming. Instead, your gun fires one or two flimsy bullets at a rate so slow that it makes killing even the basic enemies such a slow process that it will sap your will to live. It certainly made me contemplate whether I could successfully bludgeon myself to death with my own controller.

The levels are long too, but that’s not a point in the game’s favor. There is no variety, and there are no power-ups. Just shoot a couple bullet-sponges, wait for more to appear, and start shooting them. Oh, and you have shields too. There are bosses, but I never successfully beat one, even on easy. I’m really trying here to say something positive about Milie & Telly just so I don’t come across like a negative meanie. The graphics are wretched, like they were lifted straight out of an animated banner ad from ten years ago, and the sound effects are more invasive to your senses than being skull-fucked by a rusty jack hammer. You know what, fuck it. Milie & Telly is weaponized boredom and should be subjected to sanctions under the Geneva Convention.

I don’t see why some people don’t try and normalize their SFX/BGM. The options are RIGHT THERE in XACT’s GUI. And if you can’t find it, the volume/pitch values can also be edited in the text files themselves. It only takes a couple minutes, compared to violating someone’s skull with a rusty jackhammer.

Kinda sucks that the game seems so bad though. The cover art is pretty good.